Asia Sentinel

The People's Car

Scattered around the city of almost 3 million people, the billboards all promote the same company: Pyeonghwa (Peace) Motors, North Korea's only passenger car manufacturer. A joint venture started in 2002 between the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church and North Korea's Ryongbong Corporation, the factory produces a tiny amount of cars for a tiny domestic market.

Does it make economic sense to build or invest in a car factory for a country with 23 million people but fewer than 30,000 vehicles, a city where cars are so scarce that in the warmer months, traffic ladies swinging their stop signs act in place of electric lights, where hardly anybody knows how to drive? And why is Sun Myung Moon, church leader, owner of an international business empire and a virulent anti-communist, investing in North Korea?

Pyeonghwa Motors invested around US$55 million to build the factory on a onetime rice paddy near the port city of Nampo, about 50 kilometers southwest of Pyongyang. In 2003, the JoongAng Daily quoted an executive from the Seoul-based Pyeonghwa, saying he expected the factory, with capacity to build 20,000 cars a year, to eventually turn a profit. However, a spokesman based in Seoul says Pyeonghwa has produced only 2,000 cars and pickup trucks in their first five years of operation.

How many cars have they actually sold? For North Korea, any statistics, much less accurate ones, are "very difficult to come by," said Erik van Ingen Schenau, an Asian car analyst and author of the book "Automobiles Made in North Korea." He quotes a French newspaper article that claims the factory sold around 400 vehicles, including SUVs, pickups, and sedans, in 2006.  He estimates the factory sold anyone from 400 to 1000 cars in 2007 and 2008, including the cars they exported to Mekong Auto, a Vietnam-based Moon company, and including the vehicles that they produced with the Shenyang-based China Brilliance. 

The Pyeonghwa factory produces cars with names such as Whistle, Cuckoo, and Three Thousand Li, which refers to the national territory of Korea, both North and South peppering the empty streets of Pyongyang, "You see these cars a lot, especially the Cuckoo," said Simon Cockerell, general manager of Koryo Tours, one of the few western tour companies licensed to operate in North Korea. 

"It took drivers some getting used to because they were used to driving Japanese cars, with steering wheels on the right," Cockerell said.  Japanese cars used to be the most common until the beginning of 2007, when Kim Jong Il banned them from the road. Reasons vary.  One report has it that a wrecked Japanese car blocked the way of his convoy as he was leaving his father's mausoleum. Others believe it was in reaction to Japan's increasing pressure over such issues as the North's refusal to tell the Japanese what happened to their kidnapped citizens, or over the North's nuclear bellicosity. While this order only applies to non-government and non-company cars built before 2003, it certainly has not made getting around Pyongang any easier for the tiny majority of residents who travel by car.

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